Harliss tugged at his shirt collar, and she saw a small cross tattooed on the left side of his neck. “I was mad,” he said. “I tried to talk to your dad. Went to his office. He said he’d call the cops on me if I came around again. Said I was harassing him. But you’ve got to understand. I just want answers. I need to know.”
Pete stood up, cursing. “This is crazy,” he said. He moved toward the door, and Harliss didn’t try and stop him. Gemma thought he might try to leave, but instead he just stood there. “This is crazy, you know that?”
Gemma didn’t bother responding. It wasn’t crazy. In fact, for the first time, everything made sense. The fact that her father could hardly stand to look at her. The strange tension between her parents, as if they existed on either side of a chasm, a secret that had fissured their world in two. Gemma’s memory of the statue and all those early hospital visits—she was probably fragile because she’d been engineered. She wondered if this was God’s way of getting vengeance on the people who’d been made so unnaturally. He was always trying to unmake them.
“What happened to your daughter?” she said. Her voice didn’t sound like her own. “What happened to Brandy-Nicole?”
Harliss clasped his hands. He might have been praying, except for the whiteness of his knuckles. Gemma knew he must be squeezing so hard it hurt. “It was pretty bad in those days,” he said quietly. “Me and Aimee was always at each other’s throats. Money, mostly. We never had any. We burned through it. We were both getting high every night. Poor Brandy-Nicole wasn’t even three yet. . . .” His voice broke. “One time I woke up and she’d wet herself, made a mess all over in the middle of the night. Had to lie in it for hours. I was passed out cold all night, and Aimee hadn’t even bothered coming home. That’s when we split up for good.”
Shockingly, Gemma had the urge to comfort him, to tell him it was all right. But of course it wasn’t.
“I needed money bad.” His voice was barely a whisper. She wondered whether he had ever told this story before. At the door, Pete was still standing there. Frozen. Horrified. “I was still doing work for your dad. All that money everywhere . . .” His eyes slid away from Gemma’s. Guilty. “At first I just pocketed a few things. Stuff no one would notice. Pawned it off direct. I know it was wrong, but you got to understand. I wasn’t thinking straight—”
Gemma shook her head to say, It doesn’t matter.
Harliss licked his lips. “But then I started thinking about a bigger payday. You know, something hefty. I thought your dad must have something he didn’t want other people to know—there’s always dirt, especially for guys like him—” Again his eyes skated nervously to Gemma’s, but she didn’t correct him. She wouldn’t defend her father ever again.
“You’re talking blackmail,” Pete said. His voice sounded very loud.
Harliss nodded. “That was the idea, yeah.” He looked like he was about to apologize again. Gemma cut him off.
“What happened?”
He took a deep breath. “I went digging around your dad’s office, through his emails.” He squirmed. “Like I said, I was out of my mind—”
“Go on,” Gemma said. She felt weirdly breathless, as if a giant hand were squeezing her lungs.
“I couldn’t figure a way into his work files. Too much security. But I was looking for dirt closer to home, anyway. I got into his personal account. Trouble. That was the subject header of one of the very first emails. Trouble.”
The air in the motel was very still. Gemma had the sense that even the dust motes were hanging motionless in the air, suspended and breathless.
“I didn’t understand any of it. Not then. It was all about some kind of investment your father had made. Your dad was pulling out. Said he’d given plenty of money already and wanted nothing to do with it anymore, said he’d figured out it was wrong. And this man, Mark Saperstein, wanted more money out of him. He said with Haven going in a new direction, it was going to make them all rich in the end if only your dad would get Fine and Ives on board. I remember one phrase exact: They die early anyway. That was at the end of Saperstein’s message.”
Gemma felt the space between her heartbeats as long moments of blank nonexistence. What had they learned in biology about clones? Imperfect science. Cancers, tumors that grew like flower buds in manufactured lungs and hearts and livers. It was as if the growth of their cells, unnaturally jump-started, couldn’t afterward be stopped.
She wondered how old she would be when her cells began to double and triple and worse.
“Your dad caught me. Not then, but another time, in his office. High as a kite. He was pissed. After all he’d done for me, giving me another chance. Don’t blame him. Cops found some of your parents’ stuff back at our place, too. A watch and other stuff. I’d been too fucked up to offload it all. Getting careless. They booked me for theft and possession, too, since they found a few bags around my place. This time I got sent away for longer, because it wasn’t the first time. But first I spent a couple of weeks in a detox unit.
“Detox nearly killed me. I was so sick. I prayed that I would die. But I didn’t.” His hand moved again to the cross on his neck. “Afterward I swore I’d never touch none of that shit again. And I haven’t. That was fourteen years ago. I haven’t even taken a sip of beer and I won’t, never again.” Those eyes, surprisingly warm, surprisingly attractive, buried in that damaged face: Gemma could hardly stand to look at him. “It’s my fault Brandy-Nicole got taken. If I hadn’t been high, if I hadn’t got sent away, she’d still be here. With me. My baby . . .” His voice broke again and he looked away, pressing the heel of a hand into each of his eyes in turn. “Aimee said she’d been snatched from a grocery store.” He shook his head. “Didn’t make any sense from the start. That woman never went to a grocery store in her life. Only a corner store for more cigarettes and beer. Besides, why’d she wait two days to call the police? She kept changing her story, too. First Bran was snatched from a cart. Then from the back of the car. She came to visit, all hopped up, told me crackpot stories, couldn’t even bring herself to cry.” Harliss stared down at his hands, now clasped again. Gemma wondered how you could have faith after a loss like that. How you could pray.
“At first I thought Aimee might have just dumped her somewhere. Maybe even hurt her. The cops looked into it but not for long. They thought I was just mad, you know. The ex and all that. Aimee had a new guy, or at least it seemed like she did. She had a lot of money all of a sudden. New clothes, better car, and she was partying hard and heavy. Well.” For the first time, he smiled. But it was a horrible smile, thin and sharp and mean, like it had been cut there by a razor. “She got hers, I guess. OD’d just a few months later. All that dirty money. It’s true what the Bible says. You reap what you sow.”
“You think she sold Brandy-Nicole,” Gemma said, but Harliss took it as a question and nodded.
“I didn’t know what to think, not then,” he said. “But a few years later I saw the story of this woman, Monique White, who’d given over her kid to some group when she was a junkie and then cleaned up and tried to get the girl back. But the girl was gone. And she was only an hour from Durham, where we lived. Might not have thought much of it, except one of the hotshots on the board of the Home Foundation gave a quote, the woman was out of her mind, blah blah, the usual BS. Saperstein. The name jumped out at me. It was the same guy your dad had been writing to.”
Gemma was starting to see it. Dr. Saperstein, brilliant and ruthless and cruel. Her father, Mr. Moneybags, and his sudden change of heart. He must have been one of Haven’s early investors, one of their angel investors.
Had he decided he wanted nothing to do with it as soon as Gemma came home? Or was it not until she started talking, started showing her defects, revealing imperfections that rendered her, in comparison to the daughter who’d died, so disappointing? And Richard Haven had been killed, maybe by Dr. Saperstein, maybe because Saperstein wanted to go from simply making clones to using them for bigger reasons. The
institute was in danger of shutting down just when Saperstein got control of it. He must have been desperate.
“I don’t understand.” That was Pete again, hugging himself, as if the room was cold, which it wasn’t. It was stifling, airless. “If Haven was making clones, why would they be after regular kids? What was the point?”
“Money,” Gemma said. Her voice squeaked. Harliss looked up at her, surprised, as if he’d forgotten she was there. Pete didn’t look at her at all. “Probably Saperstein wanted my dad’s company to invest, to keep the institute on legs. Maybe they realized remaking dead kids for rich guys wasn’t exactly a cash cow.” Pete cursed under his breath. Gemma got a raw pleasure in saying it. Remaking dead kids. The secret was out. She was a freak and a monster. There was no doubt about that now. “Fine and Ives has always done a lot for the military. So Saperstein would have tried to prove the clones could be useful, to land a big contract. But if they couldn’t afford to keep making them . . . Well, he took children he thought wouldn’t be missed. He used them to test on. Just long enough to get the money he needed.”
“So there were normal kids at Haven,” Pete said, “mixed in with the replicas.”
She couldn’t even be angry that he’d called them normal. What else would they have been? “Probably just in that first generation,” Gemma said. Harliss had said his daughter was roughly her age. “Once Saperstein got the military contract through Fine and Ives, he wouldn’t have taken the risk. Replicas are expensive, but they’re disposable. At least, that’s what everyone at Haven thought.” She thought of the way Lyra’s hands trembled, her thinness, her confusion. She thought of the disease as if it were a kind of infestation, dark insects marching through Lyra’s blood, nesting in the soft folds of her brain.
“All this time I thought maybe Bran was still out there,” Harliss said. He blinked back tears again. It made him look even more doglike, those big watery eyes and the wetness of his nose. “Since I got sprung six weeks ago, I’ve been on the trail. After I saw you”—he nodded briefly in Gemma’s direction, as though they’d met in North Carolina for tea—“I thought I’d come down here myself to see it. I thought I could maybe find a way onto the island, see for myself what they were doing to those poor souls. But I was too late. I was too late. The flames were two, three stories high. Whoever burned it did it good.”
“I know,” Gemma said quietly. “We saw it. We were there.”
Harliss shook his head. “I didn’t know what to do. This one woman, Emily Huang, kept cropping up in all the things I read about the Home Foundation. There was even a picture of her in one of the papers. And then I knew. I’d seen her one time with Aimee. It was at your house. She musta come around with Saperstein, but she spotted Aimee on the way out, started fussing over Brandy-Nicole. I thought I’d come to Palm Grove anyways, even though I heard all about how she strung herself up. What else could I do? And then there I was, sitting in my motel room and thinking about what to do next, and across the street I see you.” He looked up, amazed. “It was like a sign. Like God saying I was on the right path.”
Gemma had almost forgotten that they weren’t there by choice—that they’d been forced there, and that even now Harliss was within reach of the gun. She felt sorry for him, but that didn’t mean she should trust him. He was desperate. That much was obvious. Desperate and with nothing to lose: a bad combination.
“Listen,” Gemma said. “I saw the island. I got close to it. The whole institute’s destroyed. There’s nobody left. If your daughter really was at Haven, she’s gone now. And I doubt you’ll find her again.”
“Gemma.” Pete said her name quietly, but he might as well have been shouting.
But she didn’t care. Everything was broken. And wasn’t it better to get it over with at once, to let the pain in, to let it take you? Wasn’t it better than these years of puncture wounds and paper cuts, these chafing lies and half-truths, that left you rubbed raw and exposed? “You have to give up,” Gemma said. “I’m sorry. But you’ll only be disappointed. It’ll only break your heart.”
“It’s too late for my heart anyway,” he said sharply, in a different tone. Fear and feeling came back to Gemma all at once when he stood up. But he moved away from her, turning his back. She thought about trying to take the gun but couldn’t bring herself to reach for it. He stood there for a long time, facing the corner where the wallpaper was curling and a door gave entry to the cheap and shitty bathroom, and after a while when Gemma saw his shoulders moving she realized he was crying.
“When Bran was a baby, I was getting high with her mom and she somehow got out of her crib. Cracked her head open on a glass table. I’ll never forget that. How much blood there was. Blood all over the carpet. She needed twenty stitches in her forehead. They almost took her away from us then.” He was losing it. “I never got to say I’m sorry. I never got to tell her . . .” But he choked on whatever else he wanted to say.
Gem wanted to stand up and comfort him, but again she couldn’t move. She was stilled by the memory of Lyra and the scar stitched above her right eyebrow. An ancient scar. Something she might have gotten as a baby.
“Mr. Harliss,” Gemma said. “Do you have a picture of Brandy-Nicole?”
He turned around. His face was the color of a bruise. His upper lip shone with snot, and she was glad when he wiped it away with a sleeve. “Yeah,” he said. He was getting control of himself again. “Been carrying it with me since the day I went away the second time.” He brought an old leather wallet out of a pocket and began fishing around in the billfold. Gemma’s arm in space looked like something foreign, something white and bloated and dead. Emma. The first one’s name was Emma, and she was dead. “Had more than this, but Aimee had ’em, so who knows where they went.”
The picture was small. The girl couldn’t have been older than three. She was sitting on the floor in a blue dress and white tights, her brown hair clipped into pink barrettes, gripping a plastic cup decorated with parading lion silhouettes and grinning at someone to the left of the camera.
“That was only six months before she got took.” Mr. Harliss had moved to sit next to Gemma. Their thighs were practically touching. It was as though he’d forgotten how and why he’d brought them there. As if they were old friends, bound together by grief. “She loved that cup,” he said. “I remember Aimee yelled at her to put it down, but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t go anywhere without that damn cup.”
The scar above the girl’s eyebrow was more obvious than it was now. But it was unmistakably her.
Lyra, the replica, the lost child.
Gemma got to her feet. Parts of her body felt leaden, others impossibly light, as if she’d been disassembled and put back together wrong. All of a sudden, she thought her lungs were collapsing. She couldn’t breathe. It was too hot. The air felt wet with heat, as if she was trying to inhale mud.
Peter squinted at her. “Are you all right?” An idiotic question: she didn’t think she’d ever be all right again.
“What?” Mr. Harliss said. “What’s wrong?”
She was going to throw up. She felt like she was relearning to walk, like she was just twitching across the room, like she might collapse. She half expected Mr. Harliss to stop her, but he didn’t. “What’s wrong?” he was saying, “What is it?” But she was at the door. She fumbled to release the chain and the dead bolt, her fingers clumsy-stiff, her body still rioting.
Then she was outside in air that was even worse, heavier, deader than the air inside. The sunshine felt like an insult. She leaned on the railing and stared down over the parking lot, heaving and coughing, trying to bring up whatever was lodged inside of her, that sick, twisted feeling in her guts, the horror of it. She wanted it out. But nothing came up. She was crying, too, all at once. The world went bright and the pain in her head narrowed to a fierce point and she was standing there in the stupid sun sobbing and snotting all over herself. A monster-girl. An alien. She was never meant to be here.
The door opened
behind her. She didn’t turn around. It would be Harliss, telling her to get back inside.
But it wasn’t Harliss. Pete came to stand next to her. He put a hand on her elbow. “Gemma?”
She pulled away from him. She knew she must look terrible. She always did when she cried, like something that had just been born, all red and slimy. Not that it mattered. He would never look at her the same way.
“Talk to me, Gemma,” he said.
The fact that he was still trying to be nice to her made her feel even worse.
“Don’t,” she said. “You don’t have to.”
“Don’t have to what?” Standing there in the afternoon sunlight, quiet and patient and sad, Pete looked like the most beautiful thing Gemma had ever seen. Like turning a corner, exhausted, lost, and seeing your house up ahead with all the lights on. Of course she would realize she was falling for him at the same time she would find out the truth about her parents and how she had been made from the sister who should have lived.
“You heard what he said.” Gemma couldn’t bring herself to repeat the words. She squeezed the railing tightly, stupidly hoping she’d get a splinter, that she’d bleed some of this away. The parking lot was dazzling with sun and ugliness. “You know what I am now.”
“What you are?” Pete reached out and placed a hand over hers. “What are you talking about?”
She couldn’t stand to have him touch her. She thought of her hand, her skin, grown in some laboratory. Was that how they did it? Did they culture her skin cells, like they would a yogurt, a bacteria? She took her hand away. “I’m a freak,” she said. She couldn’t stop crying. Jesus. “I’m some kind of a monster.” Her heart was beating in her throat, making it hard to talk. “The worst part is I think I always knew. I always felt it.”